Asklemmy

I'm a super-taster and thanks to lots of childhood abuse I'm hypervigilant. So pretty much everything. If a person anywhere in the area has been smoking or in a smoky room any time in the last day or two, I'll know it. I know what you last ate - and drank, if it wasn't water. I can hear a woman sobbing quietly in a locked room down the hall when nobody else can.

I see beauty in the clouds in the sky at night. I smell faint smoke on the wind. Scents that remind me of long ago, when I was a child - like the smell of shrinky-dinks coming off a hot metal mold, or pastries coming out of an Easy-bake oven. Autumn leaves swirling in an icy breeze. Or the smell of something like earwax, or tar.

I often wonder how normal people live without sensing so much of the world!

I have Synesthesia. When I hear certain sounds, I see these little bubbles of color. It’s sort of similar to the eye-floater things you get sometimes, that’s the best way I can describe it. I’ll also get a taste in my mouth looking at specific colors.

I’m not sure if that counts, but it’s the first thing I thought of.

i can hear power supplies. kinda annoying.

Older TVs I could "sense" when they were turned on or off like a room over.

I assume it was a sound but I couldn't really explain it back then lol, it really was more of a "feeling"

Not me but my gf has a rare condition called SCDS. Basically, she can hyper hear her own body. Her heart sounds like a loud bass drum. She can hear her eyes when they move. She can hear her bones when they creak.

It is unsettling and can be quite dis-orienting and painful. She has surgery scheduled next year to fix it!

i can see very well in the dark, like pitch black night in the arctic circle in a forest i can see the ground enough that i wont trip and can avoid things like snakes

i fucking hate all the bright lights on cars now btw. the sun is genuinely distressing to me i just simply cannot go outside without sunglasses, even when its very cloudy

Idk if it's rare, but my wife thinks it's weird that I can smell on the breeze if we are near a winery. It's kind of an astringent smell

Changes in air pressure(I think). Its like everything goes quiet theres ringing it feels very weird. I always ask to see if anyone else notices.

You how you get up on a winter morning after the rain and everything sounds different and the air is crisp. Yeah sometimes I can feel that a sudden shift and its very jarring like ive been stunned for a few seconds.

The frame rate on high refresh monitors

I've got friends that say they can't tell the difference, who've only ever used 60hz

The god-awful taste of sugar substitutes.

A lot of people can taste things like saccharine I think? But I can taste any fake sugar, even when there is a mix of real and fake sugar in the same thing.

Aspartame/acesulfane is definitely the worst of them all, but sucralose, stevia… all of them taste like medicine kind of.

I can also taste the difference between cane and beetroot based granulated sugar. Beetroot sugar is sharper.

I used to be able to smell ants and hear electricity. My senses aren't as keen as they used to be though.

Before I lost my sense of smell I was absurdly sensitive to ranch. If my ex opened a ranch dip in the apartment I would be dry-heaving very quickly. When I was a kid I would sometimes move seats eating lunch at school because other kids had ranch doritos. Not having to deal with that anymore was a rare positive to come out of my awful experience with covid.

I can enjoy coldcuts and cheeses, but they'll make me sick if they're not extremely fresh. In some cases they already smell and taste like they've gone rancid fresh off the slicer.

Pancreatitic sepsis fucked my tastebuds, my hospital stay was extended a full week because I couldn't keep down foods other than sweets. They actually restarted me on the feeding tube because of that. When I went off the NPO and got to eat again for the first time I asked for a spicy sandwich from Chick-Fil-A, I'm pretty sure it was just an ordinary spicy sandwich but in that moment it tasted like the spiciest thing I had ever eaten in my entire life. I don't like the taste of water anymore, which is miserable.

I can smell when a woman is pregnant. I've shocked several friends by congratulating them before they even took a test.

The fucking documentation for the libraries we program with, apparently. Everyone else at work either just vibecodes or goes "aw I don't know how to do that, it probably can't be done :c"

I don't have a sense of smell but I can still smell if it's cold or hot outside.

Ah I can hear security cameras sometimes.

I can feel whether a battery is full or empty based on its weight. I know it doesn't make sense but I've done a blind test and it works. Empty battery is lighter.

There are syringes that come prefilled with saline used to flush IVs. Some people can taste it when it's injected, others can't. I'm one of those who can.

I can quickly learn to recognize specific people's footsteps, so I can hear who's approaching. Sometimes it doesn't even depend on what footwear the person is wearing.

Apparently I can hear high pitched sounds too. I've heard such sounds several times where people around me weren't able to hear it, and recently I could hear an ultrasound device too, which kinda make sense since they start at around 20 kHz.

Also, this isn't about sensing, but I can slow my heart rate temporarily simply by holding my breath.

Mould, I'm always surprised at how few people can smell when food is mouldy. I've had people insist the smell is a chemical smell, until we've found the offending mouldy item (e.g. When someone's left a cup of coffee on their desk and gone on holiday) and I reap the glory of being right.

I have a heart condition that I get an ECG (electro cardiogram) done for every 6 months or so. It's just an ultrasound on your heart. They always take mine from a bunch of different angles and a bunch of different types of pictures.

But I was recently in the hospital and told the technician that their machine was loud. She looked baffled. I told her I can hear the ultrasound and hers is the loudest I've encountered. Apparently I'm the only person she's ever done work on (or however to say that) that's been able to hear it.

So I guess that is my super power. Or I'm just autistic, as apparently many autists can hear very high pitched noises.

But the ultrasound is pretty cool. The frequencies and the pitch will change depending on what photo mode they're in. Like a doppler mode is all pewpewpewpewpew while the normal mode is all eeeeeeeeeeeee. Lol. It's hard to explain.